Writer Patty’s Publication Adventure

In part one of my gems series on editing, we discussed macro edit which can be compare to cleaving, the first process that a diamond goes through after it is mined.  Blocking, faceting and polishing are the next steps.  The cut determines the brilliance and sparkle that the diamond has as light reflects off the edges.

Here is where you get down to the real shape of your manuscript.  I recommend reading the story through again, but one chapter at a time, just like the diamond cutter works on one edge at a time.  A 100,000 words seems like a daunting and impossible task, but you can tackle 2,000 to 5,000 words at a time.  Read the chapter and have a list of things you can do to improve it.  Your own list may be longer or shorter depending on your own natural writing ability and how long you have been writing.  Below is my list.

1. Rewrite awkward sentences and check for sentence variety while cutting out double adjectives and most of the adverbs.
2. Sharpen the dialogue.  Make sure it sounds natural, and evaluate the use of speech tags.
3. Look for scenes where you can use imagery to show instead of tell.  Also watch for any sentences with watched, hear, saw, felt, was and were.  All passive voice that tells the reader instead of shows them what is going on.
4. Reread the chapter to evaluate for flow and any plot holes that need fixing.

Diamond Editing

I repeat these steps for each chapter.  If I happen to catch homophones, spelling errors that spell check misses or grammatical errors, I will fix them, but my focus at this stage in the editing process is to make the story more readable or more entertaining.  Usually, I try to do two chapters a day or more.

What are some of the things you look out for and change during this type of editing?  Here is a great forum thread on what other writers look for when editing.

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Tags: editing, fiction, fiction writing, writing fiction, writing tips

This entry was posted by writerpatty on Monday, June 22nd, 2009 at 5:11 pm and is filed under Dialog, Gems, Site Rec, editing, fiction, imagery, writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.